It's for a Book--I Swear!

You know that feeling when you're writing a scene and you have to google something kinda shady?

And you go like this

and type in something like "How far out do you have to toss a body in the lake so it won't come back to shore?"

(BTW, that totally wasn't me. But it was another writer's actual search.)

So this week I had to google things like "opium form suitable for smoking" and "how to smuggle opium" and I sort of expected the NSA to come after me. I didn't want to be alone in my paranoia, so I decided to ask around and find out what other creeptastic things writers are googling in the name of research.

And let me just say...

The scary shit in writer-brains is way, way out there.

Generally, it fell into three categories:

Scientific, Cultural, or Historical Details
What are ghillie suits?
How large is the fallout from a nuclear bomb?
What are some dirty words in Portuguese?
LGBT adoption procedures
The Black Plague
Teenage prostitution
Sword fighting
Youth custody
Hacking and wifi signal jammers
Armenian baby names (awww)
Are rats nocturnal? (Yes.)

Not bad, right? But then there is category two.

Drugs, Violence, and Death
Bleeding to death, suffocation symptoms, various bladed weaponry (that's one person)
Molotov cocktails, pipe bombs, guns, how to make a bomb with alcohol and dish soap (also one person...living on an army base)
What makes someone pass out naturally?
How do you make a pipe bomb?
Poisonous flowers, chloroform, rohypnol, cocaine, opium (OK, that last one is me)
How long does it take someone to die from a gunshot wound?
How to stab someone but not kill them
Ecstasy pills and the time frame it lasts in your body and what happens when you mix it with alcohol.

"How to make meth and pictures of a meth lab explosion. Just typing that first sentence made me want to explain everything to Google." (Understandable.)
BEHEADINGS.

And then we have category three.

JUST PLAIN WEIRD
Whether being stabbed in the eye can kill you
What dead bodies smell like
HOW TO GIVE A LOBOTOMY

New ways to kill or maim people in interesting yet believable ways (at least she wants to be interesting)

At what degree a fire would need to be to completely char a human body?

What is the slowest & most painful way to kill someone with a knife?

At this point, I'm feeling pretty good about my opium search.

My favorite search was this: What is the hobby horse sex position? (not supplying an image for that one, although I did marvel at its ingenuity)

And the grand prize goes to this writer: "Mine was googling the story about the little Dutch boy who stuck his finger in the dike. Trust me, you don't want to google some of those words together."

Yep. I'm gonna trust her on that.